Anime Club Escapades: 01/11/2013

It’s been more than a month since we last had a meeting. Chuu2 and Tonari ended long ago enough that none of us really want to continue with them during club. Perhaps at some other time we will finish them as a group, but honestly I think enough people watch these anime on their own time that they don’t care whether or not it happens. I’m pretty much done with fall season. That said, life without anime club is one that’s become, quite honestly, a bit boring. That is, as long as you admit yourself to having nothing else to do with your day other than study. I admit to having nothing else to do with my day other than study and go clikkityclackin on the internet for no particular reason other than to, you know, write posts, watch anime, go on Twitter, edit my MAL, play LoL, drool at some sweet Steam deals, listen to music, wander aimlessly on YouTube you know what I think people are full of bullshit when they see people on the computer and assume that they’re doing nothing not because it isn’t usually true but because the kinds of people who make this assumption are people who never use the internet. There’s obviously plenty of things to do on the internet and it doesn’t mean that I’m slacking off or anything to that note. I’m just glad I’m now in a place where I don’t get berated for this daily. Maybe this is also a bad thing. Now I’m not so glad. Shit.

I say this in spite of being in contact with all my friends in anime club during the break. Being Facebook butt-buddies with most of them was also a big help. Of course, over the break, I was less inclined to stay on the computer and more interested in catching up with my extended family, since I don’t, you know, talk to them quite as much as I do with my friends. I only have one cousin who is also into anime, but he’s more into things like, uh, Gintama or Fairy Tail and such. He’s also like my other friends who are more into American/British TV shows than anime. We had spent the majority of our time watching seasons of Supernatural. Before I get even more off-topic, let’s turn back to the main point of discussion, which was the actual meeting.

Campus life is peculiar for me. My living quarters are not directly on campus, so I need to take a bus in order to get there. Unfortunately, from where I live, the last bus to take me on campus operates about two hours before the meeting actually starts. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have to reiterate anymore that I have little else to do because of my usual habits, so suffice to say I was perfectly content with arriving at the room about two hours early. I had ulterior motives for doing this too, for that matter. You see, I still needed to download a couple of anime, and the room had reliable Wi-Fi up to a point, so I could just sit there and go clikkityclakkity and be happy with myself. I do hate, though, that this network does not allow torrents. It’ll allow those DDL sites where they purposely restrict your bandwidth because they’re assholes like that, but given the amount of time I had to wait for everyone to get there it was ample opportunity to finish downloading.

Perhaps if you haven’t noticed by now, I don’t have very many friends outside of the club right now.

I say that I’m the Vice President of this anime club, but I can’t honestly affirm that I have all that much power, nor can I say the same of our president (whom I have dubbed the name Madarame-senpai). Us, plus Tomoe, Freddie, and Haro, make up pretty much the brains of the organization. We decide what to show during anime club and also discuss smaller things like get-togethers, additional screenings, things like that. I’ll tell you more about them later as time goes by, but for now it’s just us dweebs watching anime every week and talking about it. It’s at least enjoyable that I can talk comfortable with each and every one of them, even though I know our tastes do not align in the slightest.

Anyway, as for the actual meeting, there wasn’t much of a turnout. We’re not so personal with the people who visit every now and then, so it explains why people don’t particularly have a strong connection to the club itself and are prone to spend their Friday Nights in different ways, like partying and such. Despite that, we do have our share of regulars who we pretty much expect to come, though they are a handful. Not that I particularly hate it, because more people for the most part means more trouble from an administrative and management standpoint, but it’s always a bit disheartening when you see empty seats. I’d hazard a guess and say that about 15-20 people showed up that night. I’m just going to assume that people chose not to come because it was cold and rainy as balls that night. It’s pussy weather here on the west coast, but it’s cold enough to scare off the uninitiated. While they were trickling in, I was twiddling with the projector since it’s my laptop they’re using to screen the anime. When you have power like this, it’s easy to take advantage of both the projector and the speakers and just start sharing things on YouTube like zefrank’s True Facts series or the HowToBasic channel. I honestly can’t believe no one had heard of those channels before I got to them.

It’s curious as to how people trickle in, too. We are for the most part casual about entering and exiting a room, much like how a lecture during the daytime works in a college campus, but that also means that it’s easy to spot which people are quite social and which are super shy or something. Our club is insular and underground in the sense that people have to search for us in order to know that we exist, but even when people make that big step to attending a meeting I’m met with all colors and shapes when it comes to personalities and interests. I’ll speak of them on an individual basis as the weeks go by.

Maoyuu Maou Yuusha

Since the second episode of Maoyuu came out that night, we decided to put that series at the front of the list by screening both episodes. I know how the bloggers reacted, and I know how my friends reacted, and I was pretty damn unsurprised at how the audience reacted the same way. There were two big reasons why all of us reacted this way (dohoho cwutididthar its funny because two boobs), but another thing I was getting from everyone was that the dialogue was getting a bit drone-y and condescending. Which is a valid issue, on my case and others, because those of us who are at least fluent in the basics of economics know how simplified the story is assuming of the human world’s economic state. Not that anyone in the audience particularly cares, mind you. They’re just torn between the drawn-out dialogues and the boobs. I’m going to guess that they are going to stick with it because of the boobs. And the occasional otaku pandering, like with the pillow and the “No one hates maids” line from the Head Maid, grandmaster of meido-do.

One thing I noted was that we were for the most part silent during the entirety of the two episodes. Usually, as I’ve seen in previous quarters, this is not the case. The kinds of people who flock to anime clubs are either quiet or extremely awkward on a social level. Now, when I say socially awkward I hope you are not thinking of shy, quiet, unassuming people who sit in the corner of the lecture hall and read books all day. That is not what socially awkward means. It actually means that you’re the kind of person who talks in the movie theater, the kind of person who knows no sense of tact or respect. Perhaps they’re loud and abrasive, or just loud, but whatever it is their voices just get on your nerves. I hate to admit that sometimes the club gets rowdy enough to make the anime itself hard to hear, but it’s not such a bad thing to start commenting on it as if you were part of an MST3k-fest. It’s not so different from having live group watches with people on the internet.

That does not apply here because for the most part they were quiet, which is a rarity. Well, it’s a rarity only because we end up not speaking when the anime is being serious, and Maoyuu is for the most part a serious anime when it’s not being bouncy. Additionally, we also tend not to follow anime which are overly serious, like Psycho-Pass or Shinsekai Yori. That’s another thing I’ll speak of later. Maoyuu got good reception in general, though all the infodumping was apparently “hard to follow” at times. I honestly don’t know how some of these people get into college in the first place.

Tamako Market

Tamako Market got a much bigger response because it’s much more light-hearted. When we met the flower shop owner I heard murmurs of “That’s a guy” and “Yeah pretty sure that’s a dude”, which was hilarious. We had the same phenomenon when it happened in Ixion Saga DT last season. Tsundere Mochizou and the slightly bratty Anko were also pretty endearing because Kyoto Animation will make anything moe as fuck, even old men sweating in a mochi shop or a bathhouse. I can’t believe I just typed that. Anyway, what obviously got the rest of them rolling was Mochiyucky, the exceedingly fabulous, outrageous talking bird. The moment he started talking, the moment the smooth sax starts playing, a friend blurts “Can we keep watching this I want to watch this it’s amazing can we watch it” and other things that cause people to foam at the mouth in excitement. It might be important to know that people don’t usually watch anime on their free time, and that coming to anime club is partially a means to catching up with current anime. Well, actually most people don’t care about whether the anime we watch is current or not. They just care if it’s entertaining enough. Tamako Market was, for the most part, entertaining.

Kotoura-san

Given my personal reception of this anime’s first episode, I was honestly expecting more people to not like how it was handled. Because honestly, you cannot look at the first ten minutes of that anime and think to yourself that her story is in any form realistically portrayed. It was too easy to laugh at. I get that it’s supposed to be tragic so that the resulting 180 garners more shock, but when watching it alone it wasn’t that great of a reaction from me. After watching this episode, however, I have come to the conclusion that I’m just an unfeeling son of a bitch. It ended up being a lot more enjoyable to watch because people weren’t expecting anything great or profound to come out of it. The cut into the guy’s obtuse thoughts got the most fascinating reaction out of people, which was enjoyable in and of itself aside from my own reaction to watching it on a bigger screen. Unfortunately when watching this on my own time, I got caught up in the potential of the story while everyone else was satisfied in how the drama and the comedy ultimately balanced out. We had discussions about this earlier where we had to promise ourselves not to laugh during the first ten minutes because that would make us horrible people and we’d go to hell or something. Really, though, it was the right amount of high school comedy and heart-wrenching drama to get people to enjoy the hell out of it.

Courtesy of Zettai Karen Children: The Unlimited – Hyobu Kyosuke

Sometimes a little sprucing up of a subpar script is all it takes to turn a pile of junk into comedy gold. The key to doing this with The Unlimited was to not-so-discreetly switch the original subs with the joke script that Whine-Subs included with their release. I have no idea how long they will continue with this trend, nor will I really know how effective this will be for the entirety of the show since apparently no one knows how long it’s going to be, but I hope they keep doing joke scripts for this anime forever. It’s that good. I mean it. Dark_Sage’s special brand of humor hits hard and it hits us right in our corrupt otaku feels with lines such as “Tastes like stick” or “Hey, chillax, my nigs” or “Fuck yeah, fortune cookie!”. No one cared that roughly a quarter of the translation was being lost in the process because it made us laugh so hard, and for the right reasons this time. The key to making a great joke script is making sure people understand the plot while making fun of the places where the dialogue is obviously filler. I firmly believe that they did a great job with this release because of how well it was received in club. Here’s to hoping that they continue to do this.

Addendum

Future posts this quarter will focus on people and general behaviors of anime club itself rather than audience reactions to episodes we’ve already seen. This is mostly preliminary information to get you guys to understand the feel of anime club.

It mostly fell square on my shoulders to make a lineup for that night’s showings. The president came up to me later to commend me on my excellent taste. Take that, internet.

This post brought to you by the Tamako Market ED. Mawaru mawaru record~